Maybe you’ve heard David Sedaris on “This American Life,” or “CBS Sunday Morning.” Or maybe you’ve read one of his many great essay collections, like “Naked” or “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”

If so, you know Sedaris is a humorist. The best kind – one with a bite. His works are at times laugh-out-loud funny, of course, but they’re also moving, occasionally a bit shocking and sometimes even a little raunchy.

A fairly regular visitor to town, Sedaris returned to Milwaukee Wednesday night for a stop at The Pabst Theater, where he read a number of essays that appeared to be all new works in progress and they ticked all those boxes.

Sedaris typically does two kinds of tours – the kind of gig he does in a theater setting and more straightforward book tours, which he usually does in a bookshop. In Milwaukee, that bookshop is usually Boswell Books, which was on hand Wednesday night to sell books in the lobby at The Pabst.

While the latter type of event is usually focused on material from whatever Sedaris’ latest book is at the time, the theater performances are more wide-ranging.

Sedaris took the stage to what appeared to be a nearly sold-out house at The Pabst.

Everything he read was unfamiliar and the fact that he occasionally stumbled a bit in his reading and also was clearly making notes or corrections with a pencil during the performance suggested that he was using us as something of a test market for new material, rather than works from his latest books, “Happy-Go-Lucky” and “A Carnival of Snackery.”

And that was just fine; we Sedaris’ fans are an willing, devoted bunch.

He read a piece about trying to connect with his godson, and one about being accosted on the street in New York City during lockdown, among others. All, like most of his work – which is based on his life – were laced with brutal honesty. So honest that one wonders how often his friends, family and acquaintances just want to slap him.

Much of Sedaris’ work focuses on his family and its complex relationships, especially, lately, about his father, who died in 2021 at the age of 98. But not so much on Wednesday night.

We were, however, treated to a really beautiful rumination on his relationship with one of his best and longest-term friends.

At the end of the evening, Sedaris took questions from the audience and one fan asked when a new book would be coming. The author replied that he wanted all the essays in his next book to be as good as the one he'd just read about his friend, and we all knew what he meant. It was lovely.

He also shared a few entries from his diary, including some very recent ones. Sedaris has famously long kept a journal and he has published books based on them.

Sedaris faced some hurdles on Wednesday night.

Of course, the material was new, but also, Sedaris said he was suffering from a cold and he went through quite a few tissues during the more than hour-long talk.

Lastly, his rhythm was derailed almost immediately after he took the stage at about 7:45 p.m. After a brief introduction, Sedaris launched into an essay about his refusal to use Siri on his phone, when the theater lit up with screens and a Silver Alert for a missing person launched a cacophony of buzzing.

He stopped reading and wandered off toward the wings to find out what was going on. Once the buzzing more or less stopped, and Sedaris chided the audience for not having turned off their phones, he simply moved on to a different essay, abandoning the one with which he’d chosen to start the show.

Sedaris was still thinking about it for a while, because later on between essays, he asked, rhetorically, how old one has to be to qualify for a silver alert.

But, a consummate professional, Sedaris got his groove back, and if anyone was disappointed you wouldn’t have known it from the applause at the end of the reading or the long line of hopefuls in the book signing line afterward.